Development of the Video Prototype

I have commenced development of the Video Prototype. I am using Adobe After Effects to animate the entire video. The video will show a emulation of my game. What better way to explain my game than to show the game itself? My aim is to present something along the lines of an actual game trailer.

The bulk of the video will be showcasing the game. I have also included an explanation of the physical input which is now the yoke (instead of the toy gun mentioned in a previous blog post). I believe the yoke is more suitable for this type of game since it just consists of horizontal movement and clicking (triggering a shot). The gun would have felt unintuitive since you won't be able to aim it freely.

My explanation of the yoke is simply showing what it looks like (stylised and not as a photograph) and animating the yoke rotating concurrently with the player's ship on the bottom of the screen.

I have created the game's sprites in Adobe Illustrator and imported them into After Effects where I have animated my game.

Animation took quite a while to do mostly because I haven't touched After Effects in a couple years. But after brushing up on my skills, I was able to get into it pretty easily. Each shot fired and letter dropped was animated manually as well as the player's ship and aliens.

Below is a screenshot of my progress nearing completion.

Getting busy in After Effects and Sony Vegas. What will I do without dual monitors.

My purpose for Sony Vegas is for compiling the raw animated footage with the music as well as cleaning up/trimming the start and end of the video/audio.